Wrecked

by Joe Ide

  “Want to listen to some music?” he said.

  “No thanks.”

  He reached across the cup holders and tried to hold her hand but she curled up to sleep. He was distraught but kept it in.

  Cameron woke up. The pain in his head thumped. His vision was off-center and he couldn’t keep his balance. Terrified, he found Peaches and hugged her, bleeding on her fur. “Are you all right, baby?” The woman who assaulted him was the same one who came into the store and asked about Arthur. He called Arthur repeatedly but all he got was his voice mail. And then he remembered. There was no cell service at Burning Man. “Oh, Arthur,” Cameron said.

  Arthur and Sarah held hands as they rode their bicycles side by side. They were in the Playa and the sun was setting, the raw desert dyed purple and gold, mutant vehicles gliding past. A psychedelic trolley car, a snail clad in armor plating, a ship made of scrap metal, merry-go-round horses prancing on the deck. Some of the huge art installations were burning, set ablaze to acknowledge that life is fleeting, live it while you can. They looked like pagan bonfires or a village in Vietnam set ablaze by the invaders. Arthur glanced at Sarah, the flames illuming her face in shimmering amber. She was beaming. She was joyous. More alive than he’d ever seen her. They smiled as they rode past a caravan of teapots and a grove of glowing tulips tall as trees.

  “I’m free,” Sarah said. “I’m free.”

  Owens was gloating when she arrived at Walczak’s house. She’d found the real Jerry. “What have you been doing all this time?” she said. “Pickin’ lint out of your belly buttons?” She grinned at Hawkins, who replied with an I’ll deal with you later glare.

  Walczak thought about taking the company helicopter but it would have to make a fuel stop and was slow compared to the jet. They landed in Reno, rented a van, and joined the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Thousands of people were heading to see the final ceremony, the burning of the Burning Man.

  Jimenez and Owens were sitting in the backseat, the road noise covering their voices. “The fuck are you doing?” he said. She had her hand on his thigh.

  She pulled her hand away. “Nothin’. I ain’t doing nothin’.”

  “Don’t they have some kind of VIP service?” Walczak said, honking the horn.

  “No, they’re very democratic,” Hawkins said. “They don’t give a fuck who you are.”

  “That’s a shame, it really is. One of these days, somebody’s going to have the balls to make America great again. You wait and see.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hawkins said. “All you rich white men will run the show? Leave us niggas out all over again?”

  “What is your problem, Hawkins?”

  “My problem is you, motherfucker.”

  “Well, what exactly?” Walczak said. “What exactly is your beef?”

  “My beef is this. We all did some dirty shit over there, but the only one who came out of it with anything is you.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Walczak replied. “All us rich white men who held you back? The fact is, I made my way and you didn’t. That’s nobody’s fault but your own.”

  Hawkins was about to get into it when Richter said, “There’s a cop up there. Pull over.”

  A highway patrolman was sitting on his motorcycle, waving the traffic along. Walczak stopped and flashed his fake FBI ID. “Officer, we’ve got a situation.”

  Photographs of Burning Man were one thing, but nothing could have prepared Isaiah for the reality of being there. It could have been a rodeo for circus performers or a circus for rodeo clowns or Comic-Con on amphetamines or Mardi Gras on Jupiter or all of the above. Hordes of people were dancing to a pounding techno beat or juggling bowls of goldfish or riding bicycles that looked like scorpions or plodding around on stilts flapping angels’ wings or playing in a marching band of women wearing white wigs, white makeup, and white choir robes.

  “You people are crazy,” Dodson said.

  “You people?” Grace said.

  “You see any bruthas out here?” They looked around. Not a black or brown face anywhere.

  “Think of it this way,” Grace said. “You guys have more sense.”

  The costumes made Stephanie’s hat seem like a plaid shirt. There was a ball gown, a gas mask, and deer horns made from tinfoil. There was a ringmaster’s tailcoat, a thong, and fireman’s boots. There was a parrot’s bill, pasties, and an overcoat of blinking Christmas lights. There were hundreds of near-naked bodies and glittery body paint and Mad Max goggles and hair extensions in peacock colors and masks—of monsters, werewolves, wild beasts, politicians, superheroes, emojis, cartoon characters, and faces for which there were no names, the whole scene lit up with a blazing array of strobe lights, neon lights, light sticks, bonfires, and the eyes of people on Ecstasy. Set farther back into the desert stood the Burning Man. Towering and majestically uplit, the God of Freedom, its silent imperial voice commanding you to come forth and worship. The massive crowd was starting to move in that direction. The witching hour was at hand. Isaiah, Grace, and Dodson stood there, overwhelmed. It was like watching the great migration of wildebeest crossing the Serengeti. Locating Sarah was no more likely than finding the one with a spot under its chin.

  “I’m sorry,” Isaiah said.

  “It’s okay.” Grace wiped a tear away with her knuckle and they joined the crowd.

  Sarah and Arthur were in the second row closest to the Man. Sarah had never seen anything so awe-inspiring in her life. She clutched Arthur’s arm and said, “Oh my.” The ceremony started with a fireworks display, great gushers of sparks screaming and exploding against the black sky, the glowing sparks floating back to earth like heaven’s fairy dust, the multitudes oohing and ahhing like they’d never seen fireworks before. As the display got louder and brighter, the crowd went berserk with anticipation, the din crashing against your eardrums, becoming almost unbearable, and then, all at once, the Man erupted into towering flames. They reached into the heavens, singeing the moon and spreading a quavering orange radiance across the Playa, the crowd screaming and laughing and whooping, cupping their hands around their mouths so eternity could hear them, and Sarah and Arthur hugged and kissed and cried.

  The highway patrolman escorted the team onto the grounds and now they were walking through the weirdest shit any of them had ever seen.

  “What’s wrong with these people?” Walczak said. “Are they all on drugs?” The crowd was returning to the camps to party, the fading glow of the Burning Man in the distance. A naked, sweaty, immensely overweight man with a penis head and the head of a puppet on his penis came riding by on a unicycle.

  “That offends me,” Hawkins said. He stuck his foot in the spokes and the man careened into a canopy and the whole thing came crashing down, hippies running everywhere. Jimenez and Owens howled. Richter was bent over double laughing.

  “WILL YOU STOP FUCKING AROUND?” Walczak screamed. The group stopped laughing but only because the wind had picked up and the air was choked with grit. They pulled their shirts up over their noses.

  “Check your radios,” Walczak yelled over the racket. “We’ll lose each other in this mess.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Jimenez said.

  “Yes. It was in Arthur’s emails.”

  The ceremony was over. Isaiah, Grace, and Dodson moved with the crowd back to the camps. Grace was looking around like she was in a life raft, lost at sea, searching the horizon for salvation. It was heartbreaking. Isaiah had let her down again. He’d failed. When they got back to Long Beach, she’d disappear and remember him as an incompetent fool who’d led her astray and was lousy in bed. He was trying to think of something to say when he realized he was feeling sorry for himself. He’d given up, too preoccupied with Grace to do his fucking job. He refocused; images, conversations, and printed words rolling past on the backs of his eyelids, his mind picking out stars of data he could connect into a constellation.

  He saw the pictures of Sarah and Stephanie in their bikinis
posing in front of the van. There was some connection between the picture and what he was seeing now, something the same but not the same, like sneakers and hiking boots. What was it? Think, Isaiah, think. Try to remember. What was it? What was it, goddammit? He remembered their arrival here, their shock at seeing the place and walking dumbfounded through the camps. GENITAL PORTRAIT STUDIO, CAMP BE BOTHERED, EMBASSY FOR EXTRATERRESTRIALS. He stopped and said, “Ever After.”

  “What?” Grace said.

  “The words on the van. Ever After. It’s the name of a camp!”

  They got directions and mounted their bikes. Dodson pedaled, Isaiah sitting on the handlebars. Grace raced ahead, standing on the pedals, grim and unstoppable, sweat darkening her shirt. “Mom is here. I know she is.”

  Walczak’s team trudged. The dust was blowing even harder and Camp Ever After was way the fuck over on the other side. They needed transportation. They tried to buy bicycles, but for some stupid reason, they didn’t use money here. There was some sort of fucked-up bartering system. Walczak tried to trade his Rolex but no one believed it was real.

  “Fuck this,” Hawkins said. He gestured at a tent set a ways off from the others. You could see silhouettes through the fabric, a four-seater golf cart covered in seashells parked in front. Jimenez and Hawkins went in together. They surprised three naked people writhing around on an air mattress. “Gimme the key to the golf cart,” Hawkins said.

  The skinny white guy with the dick shaped like an ear of corn stood up. “Get out of here. You can’t do this.”

  The bald-headed girl with three nose rings and a tat of the Japanese war flag dawning out of her pubes said, “There’s security here, you know.”

  “We can have you arrested,” the girl with the hairy armpits and a bush like Madagascar declared. They Tasered all three of them, found the keys, took their water and kerchiefs for their faces. They piled into the golf cart, Hawkins standing on the running board. They asked around. Camp Ever After was thataway. It took forever driving through the rabble but they got there. The so-called camp was just a random area marked off from its neighbors by the orientation of the tents. It was a fucking melee like everywhere else, everybody partying like a giant meteor had just passed through the stratosphere. The team checked their radios again and split up.

  Walczak drew the kerchief up over his face, grit in every crease and crack in his body, the cacophony unceasing. There was no chance they’d find Sarah in this shit storm. She could be standing right next to him wearing a testicle mask or driving around in a shopping cart full of snapping turtles. A whoosh of flames made Walczak duck. It was a goddamn fire-eater. The guy was carrying a torch and blowing solvent onto the flames, a burst of them billowing into the air, people gawking like this had never been done before.

  He shouted at the wind. “I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE!”

  They arrived at Camp Ever After, exhausted. Massive numbers of people were partying. “I’ll take the left side,” Grace said. “Dodson, can you take the right?”

  “I’m on it.”

  “If we haven’t found her in an hour, meet back here,” Isaiah said. Grace and Dodson moved off. Isaiah remained, turning in a circle, doing his hawk-eye thing. If Sarah was visible he’d see her. He blinked. Walczak was coming right toward him. He was pissed off, sweating, his tennis sweater soiled with dust, his grimace gleaming unnaturally. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, “but I guess you know that.”

  “You are too.” Isaiah hated evil motherfuckers like Walczak and Seb, their rot and stink an infectious corruption like leprosy on a child. Irrationally, he wanted them to acknowledge what they were, what they’d done, and how the world would be a better place if they had never existed. “What does Sarah have on you?” Isaiah said. “Pictures of you torturing and killing helpless people who couldn’t fight back? That’s what you did, isn’t it? Tortured and killed helpless people who couldn’t fight back?”

  Walczak smirked. “Keep talking, asshole.”

  “I’m curious,” Isaiah went on like he was asking about lawn care. “How do you feel when you look back on all that? Do you think you were a hero? That you were courageous? That you were serving your country?”

  Walczak stepped in close. “I’m going to kill you, Isaiah. I’m gonna kill you slowly.”

  “Let me put it another way,” Isaiah said. “If your family knew what you did, would they be proud of you? Would anybody be proud of you? When those pictures come out, will you be proud of yourself?”

  “Listen, you fuck,” Walczak said. “Spend your measly million bucks while you can because you don’t have much time left.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Isaiah said earnestly. “Sarah beat you out of some chump change and now you have to kill her? That’s not a rational response. That’s what a crazy man would do. That’s what a sociopath would do. Don’t you have any perspective on yourself? Don’t you see what you are? You’re a useless degenerate, Walczak. A creature, like a leech or a cockroach, but at least they serve a purpose. Why don’t you do mankind a favor and go somewhere and die?”

  “Don’t ever let your guard down,” Walczak said. “Not ever in your life.”

  “You have a false impression of me,” Isaiah said.

  “Do I? And what’s that?”

  “You’re under the impression that I’m afraid of you.”

  Walczak heard something in his earbud. He reacted sharply and turned away. “Meet at the cart,” he said as he ran off. They found Sarah, Isaiah thought. He hobbled after Walczak but couldn’t keep up and watched him thread his way through the crowd and converge with the others at a golf cart. He’d never catch them. Reflexively, he reached for his useless phone, despaired a moment, and went to look for Grace.

  Arthur and Sarah whirled around in a mad waltz, laughing and making out. The crowd was dancing wildly. Joints were passed and people were dipping their cups into a garbage can full of lethal-looking punch, not even lemons or oranges floating in it. The dust was picking up, but they were used to it now. Arthur got winded and sat down at a picnic table and she sat on his lap.

  “Isn’t this wonderful?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s the best.”

  “Thank you, Arthur. Thank you so much.” She kissed him hard on the mouth. He broke it off. “What’s the matter?” she said. He pointed with his chin. Through the crowd, they caught a glimpse of Walczak and his team gathering at a golf cart. The Latino man was pointing in their direction. “No, it can’t be!” Sarah cried.

  “Easy, my love. Stay calm. We’ve got to get to the car.” He took her hand and they hurried to their bicycles. “We’re going to be okay. We’re going to be fine.”

  Grace made her way through the frenzy of partyers, searching desperately for her mother’s face, her mother’s love, the ten years they’d lost forever. The crowd was so huge, the music so loud. A wave of hopelessness overtook her and she stopped, irrationally angry at Isaiah. He was supposed to find her mom. He said he would find her mom. But here she was, wandering around blindly, stupidly, with absolutely no chance of—“Jesus Christ.”

  There was Sarah. Grace couldn’t believe it. It had to be an apparition or a trick of the light. She blinked and stared but it was her mom all right, riding off on a bicycle with a heavyset man. Like a punch to the heart, Grace felt the long days of hope and despair, of wanting and wishing, of saying her mother’s name aloud when she woke up and when she went to sleep. A decade of emotions exploded out of her. “MAAAAHM!” she screamed. Ecstatic, she started to run but slowed and recoiled in horror. Walczak and the others were in a golf cart speeding after them.

  “Oh no! Oh no!”

  The cart swerved around a group of revelers and smashed into the fire-eater, his torch flung onto a tent. Walczak tried to keep driving but the crowd was angry, grabbing the cart and rocking it back and forth and screaming at the team. The team screamed back, threatening and shoving people away. More people were massing, trying to see what was happening. Grace fought her way t
hrough them, screaming Maaahm, Maaahm! The fire-eater’s torch had set a tent on fire and what was probably a propane lamp exploded. Not chaos, but pure mayhem broke out, some of the crowd pushing in to help, others panicked and pushing to get away, the fire leaping from tent to tent, people slapping at the flames with blankets and dousing them with water bottles, dark smoke billowing, everyone screaming and shouting while the flames grew and grew, fanned by the wind.

  A bunch of young guys, fueled by alcohol, were brawling with Walczak’s team. The giant black guy was enjoying himself, grinning as he punched faces and kicked groins. The Latino guy was judo-flipping his opponents but getting hit repeatedly, bloodied but strangely patient, as if it would all end soon. Porkpie swung wildly, the tall woman whacking people with a police baton. Walczak was workmanlike, downing one attacker after another as if he was unloading a truck. People were throwing rocks and cans of food and chunks of firewood, the team with arms over their heads. Grace was joyful and screamed her delight. Her mom was getting away! And then Porkpie drew a gun and fired into the air. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. The mayhem was a game of croquet compared to the flat-out craziness that detonated. The entire area broke apart, people streaming between the flaming tents, dragging their friends along, hands over their faces, choking on the black smoke.

  “Oh no!” Grace shouted. “Please, no!” The golf cart was free and speeding into the desert night, the crew screaming at their prey. Grace chased them, but the cart was far ahead, its taillights like dying embers, getting dimmer and dimmer. “Don’t you hurt her! DON’T YOU HURT MY MOM!” The taillights disappeared, swallowed by darkness and the whorls of storming dust. Grace fell to her knees. She screamed and beat the desert floor with her fists and wept. And then Isaiah was there, kneeling beside her.